Day: June 30, 2017

Everyone wants to know what it all means… there is the 90-day travel ban (everyone, not just refugees) from six majority Muslim countries and then the 120-day moratorium for all refugees from all countries, but only for those refugees who don’t have certain relationships with those who got here before them.

And, so far it looks like resettlement agencies may not count as having “bona fide” relationships as ‘entities,’ but all of that could change next month, next week or the next minute! Therefore I am not going to wander in to the weeds of all this or lose sleep over it. We will just see how things evolve because there is nothing we can do to influence it all anyway.

By legislating from the bench, the Supremes have made it likely that even fewer persecuted Syrian Christians will be admitted to the US before late fall.

Just so you know we are at 49,248 refugees for this fiscal year when I checked Wrapsnet earlier this morning. We will hit 50,000 probably by July 6th, then what?

And, just to give you some comparison, that 49,248 is the highest number of refugees (excluding FY16) that we have admitted by the end of June in the last ten fiscal years, so the contractors*** shouldn’t be whining about a lack of paying ‘clients’ this year.

Syrian Christians now have an even smaller chance of getting to the US.

While I was at Wrapsnet, I checked the Syrian numbers. We have seeded 6,397 Syrians in to your towns and cities this fiscal year (which ends on Sept. 30th). Of the 6,397, 6,258 were Muslims of some variety. That puts the rate at 98% Muslim for the year (so far) for Syrians.

That same rate (Muslims to others) applies for the 1,809 Syrians Donald Trump’s State Department admitted since inauguration day.

As I continue to mention, because we have admitted so few Christian Syrians, any applying now likely will not have relatives here while the Muslims will, so expect the Syrian Muslim relatives to continue to be admitted (thanks to the Supreme Court writing refugee law!) because we all know that if they are relatives of someone here already, they couldn’t possibly be terrorists, right?

Here are a couple paragraphs from Vox. They and other leftwing media are trying very hard to figure out what it all means for their friends who make a living in the refugee industry and for those wanting more new Democrat voters that refugees represent. And, of course, so that they can further vilify Donald Trump.

What the ban means for refugees who don’t have “bona fide” family members in the US according to the categories laid out by the State Department. Many advocates have argued that the Supreme Court’s ruling should permit nearly all refugees to enter the US, because refugees have to be placed with a resettlement agency before entering the country, and that should count as a “bona fide” relationship. But the Supreme Court didn’t specify that, and the administration doesn’t seem to be taking it that way.

In a press call on Thursday, a senior administration official said that “the fact that a resettlement agency in the United States has provided a formal assurance for refugees seeking admission is not sufficient, in and of itself, to establish a bona fide relationship under the ruling.”It’s not yet clear whether this means refugees will only be admitted if they already have close family in the US, or whether some stage in the resettlement process will count as a “bona fide” relationship. And all refugees who are scheduled to arrive in the US through July 6th will be able to come without incident. But after that, tens of thousands of refugees, and the resettlement agencies in the US that employ people to help them, remain under a cloud of uncertainty — and it’s not looking good.

State Department Press Briefing with unidentified speakers!

Trump senior administration officials speaking to the media: From the Department of Justice we have [Senior Administration Official Five]. From DHS we have [Senior Administration Official Four]. From State we have [Senior Administration Official Two] and [Senior Administration Official Three]. [Senior Administration Official One] is from the White House. Whoever it was that opened the press briefing we have no clue.

Thanks to Voxfor alerting us to the State Department press briefing to selected media here yesterday. You can read it inbetween your Independence day festivities.

Wouldn’t you think that the Trump Administration would at least try to be more open and transparent than the previous administration. I’ve noticed over the years that at these briefings, no one is permitted to know by whom they are being briefed!

No one in the Administration wants their name used—-just disgusting!

We’re joined today by senior administration officials from the White House, Departments of State, Homeland Security, and also from Justice. From the Department of Justice we have [Senior Administration Official Five]. From DHS we have [Senior Administration Official Four]. From State we have [Senior Administration Official Two] and [Senior Administration Official Three].

As a reminder, the call will be conducted on background. Attribution should be to senior administration officials.

Like this:

While we are busy fixating on the ‘travel ban’ and the refugee moratorium, Trump’s Dept. of Homeland Security has begun to find those illegal alien parents who paid smugglers to get their children to the US border where they then became wards of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement(in HHS). Many of the ‘children’ were subsequently turned over to their parents. (The largest percentage of ‘children’ were teenage boys!)

A couple of our usual suspects, refugee contractors, also make a bundle from their involvement with the ‘children.’ The US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (and possibly others) benefit financially from the illegal alien kids.

The Trump administration has begun a new surge of immigration enforcement targeting parents who have paid to have their children illegally brought to the United States.

The recent arrests, which had been largely rumored but not confirmed until now, have set off a new wave of confusion and fear through immigrant communities that have already been subject to greater enforcement.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have begun sharing information with immigration agents about U.S.-based relatives of unaccompanied children. The information is being used to track down the parents, according to lawyers and government case workers familiar with the practice.

[….]

“The kids are basically being used as bait at this point,” said a field specialist with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency that takes custody and shelters unaccompanied immigrant children.

[….]

Jennifer Elzea

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials confirmed Thursday that they have begun a new enforcement initiative to “disrupt and dismantle” human-smuggling facilitators, including arresting the sponsors who have paid criminal organizations to smuggle children into the United States. They did not say what charges were being applied.

“ICE aims to disrupt and dismantle end-to-end the illicit pathways used by transnational criminal organizations and human smuggling facilitators,” said Jennifer Elzea, deputy press secretary for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “As such, we are currently conducting a surge initiative focused on the identification and arrest of individuals involved in illicit human smuggling operations, to include sponsors who have paid criminal organizations to smuggle children into the United States.”

Immigration officials cited Office of Refugee Resettlement statistics on Thursday that show approximately 90 percent of all unaccompanied children encountered at the southwest border are eventually turned over to a family member residing in the United States.

[….]

In February, Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly issued new orders to agency heads that would considerably expand the number of immigrants who could be detained and deported.

One of the memos said 155,000 unaccompanied children have been detained in the past three years.

There is a very informative report, here, put out by the Congressional Research Service on the Unaccompanied Alien Children problem. I thought this graph was useful. It shows the number of UACs and how many are turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (although they are NOT refugees).

Note the enormous jump in numbers as the Obama Administration signaled that it would turn a blind-eye to the invasion of the ‘children.’